


Down the Dark Mountain

by dewinter



Series: The Bloody Sire [4]
Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-03
Packaged: 2018-12-22 16:51:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11971584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dewinter/pseuds/dewinter
Summary: Hope stole over them, that summer.*August, 1944. London and Castle Colditz.





	1. Shaftesbury Avenue, London, August 1944

Hope stole over them, that summer. Hard to touch, harder to fathom, but there all the same. Murmurs on the wind: Paris would be theirs in days. There might be an end to it, at last – far off, still, but lingering somewhere on the horizon. Giddy with the summer and with the sense of an ending, the lads dragged Collins into the city. No peace to lick his wounds and think about how he’d grown old, between their abandoning France, and their saving her. The years that should have been the best.

They ended up at the Trocadero on Shaftesbury Avenue, of course. The band making an almighty hash of Sentimental Over You and the line at the bar three men deep. Shouting to be heard, their boots grinding ash into the once-fine carpet. They found a booth under the mezzanine – five of them crammed in tight with a couple of soused Yank paratroopers newly back, newly victorious, from the line.

The same old conversations, skirting neatly around the deaths they’d seen and those they’d perpetrated. Everyone playing their part – haughty Brits and swaggering Yanks. And then Ronnie Follett spotted them from across the pub and muscled his way into the booth too, _scuse me mate, budge up a bit, would you._ A lot of shuffling and rearranging and apologising, and in the midst of it Collins felt the paratrooper on his left put his hand firmly on his leg.

At first he thought the man was steadying himself. He twitched his leg, just a little, glancing sideways at him. The hand, hidden under the table, didn’t move. It felt like it was made of cast iron. Fisher was holding forth on _Going My Way_ and the many charms of Risë Stevens. Kowalski was complaining about the beer. Collins shifted a little in his seat, which only brought their legs into closer alignment.

The man’s thumb traced a lazy, insouciant circle on the soft inside of his thigh. Collins’ skin felt too tight. He opened his mouth to say something – what? What could he possibly have said? _Would you mind terribly –_ and the guy merely tilted his head and twitched his eyebrows upwards. _I dare you._ God. It was like the apex of a loop, the sudden swoop in his gut. Like the bottom dropping out of the sky. The man looked straight at him, at the starburst of wrecked flesh under his jaw, at his mangled ear and the lopsided droop of his right eyelid, and kept grinning. Collins swallowed, hard, and didn’t look away.

And then were all getting up, suddenly, and Kowalski was bellowing something about heading round the corner to the Strand, and Collins’ heart was racing so hard he thought he might pass out. A jumble of arms and legs and men stumbling to the doors and into the warm evening. _Not yet,_ Collins thought, wildly.

They were standing on the corner, girls with their whole, unblemished boyfriends streaming past. The West End thrummed with frantic, whirling life. And then they were parting, and trading final good-natured insults, and scattering across the city, and there was nothing Collins could do to stop it.

“Safe flying, pal,” the man said, just to him, tipping a lazy salute. He looked like a hero in a western. Rakish smile and cocked hip.

Collins nodded helplessly. “And to you. Safe – safe jumping.”

“Oh, it’s never safe,” the man said, laughing. There might have been a wink thrown in – or maybe Collins added that later. “That’s what makes it fun.”

And he was gone, jogging to catch up with his mate.

Collins was still thinking about it hours later, in the cramped hotel room he was sharing with Kowalski. Lying on the narrow, lumpy mattress in his skivvies, feeling his heart still pounding. His left thigh looked just the same as the right. Pale and fuzzy, and not a scalded handprint in sight.

These days his body dealt in brusque handshakes, and little else. _Good job, old man._ Slaps on the back that rattled the teeth. A jovial arm around the shoulder. Impersonal, efficient medical procedures. His sister’s sweet, brisk hugs, at most. That such a foolish, trivial thing should have undone him so completely: a stranger’s hand on his leg, fleeting, in a crowded West End pub.

It had been years since he’d felt such sudden, blistering intimacy. Like a hand reaching into his chest, between his ribs, and twisting his heart. His fourth patrol – his first kill. Weeks out of basic, back in ‘39. A Ju88, somewhere over Belgium. One moment it had been banking left, and the next it had yawed sharply, rolled over, and plunged towards the ground. So graceful it had almost looked deliberate, but for the plume of black smoke pouring from its side. He’d shredded the fuselage with a single recklessly-aimed burst.

“Bail,” he’d muttered. “Bail, you bastards. Fucking bail.” One chute, and then no more. He’d forced himself to watch all the way down - the fireball on impact was immense.

He’d still been shaking when he made it back to base. Nearly keeled over when he swung down from the wing onto the asphalt.

And then Farrier had been there, pulling off his flight helmet, his face sweaty. He’d gripped Collins’ arm with one hand, and cupped his neck with the other, and Collins could feel his fingertips even through his heavy flight gloves. Right down to the bone.

“Listen,” Farrier had said. Hissed and low, so that only the two of them could hear. Their foreheads almost touching. “Listen to me. It was a good shot.” No pointless, hollow platitudes about _rather them than us_ , or _you were only doing your duty_ , or _it was over before they knew it_. “I was glad you were up there with me.”

His fingers tightened. “It gets easier, Al. It does.”

It could have sounded patronising; he could have made Collins feel small and young. Somehow, it hadn’t. It’d felt for an instant as though they were the only two people in the world. He’d touched the bruises Farrier’s fingers had left, later, when he’d been alone. The back of his neck where Farrier’s hand had been had prickled for what seemed like days. He’d thought it was about comfort, about grounding. Maybe he’d been dizzy and weightless and untethered for years. In truth, it had been the last profound, intimate gesture of his life.

Kowalski was snoring drunkenly. The bedsprings dug into Collins’ back. He’d not written to Farrier for weeks, now, and the guilt was beginning to gnaw. _We had a pleasant day at the seaside, as you may have heard,_ he’d written after Overlord. He wasn’t much of a correspondent – his letters were empty, banal, mostly. Stuff the censor would allow. Stuff for raising morale. The bar they’d added to his DFC the previous winter. The best bits of _Cover Girl._ Sterile, cheery rubbish. Nothing about the burn up his right flank, and the aching that never quite eased, or the 109 he’d had stuck on his tail for three nervous minutes over Gold Beach. Nothing about how there were only five men left on base who remembered Farrier, and Collins was one of them. Nothing very much at all, really, to show for all the fags they’d shared, all the chatter on the waves. All the sunsets they’d survived. All the times they’d saved each other’s lives.

The handful of letters he’d received from Colditz, just as stilted and vague as his own efforts, were tucked in his footlocker back at base, tied with twine, safe under his shaving kit and his dress cap and the last birthday card his mother had ever sent him.

His mind kept sticking on the endings, though. Signed off with a single initial, a bold dashing _L_. It felt like a secret code. _Yours,_ Farrier wrote, sometimes. Lately, _yours ever._ And in his latest, which was still tucked in Collins’ breast pocket, _ever yours._ The words kept Collins up at night. _Ever yours,_ he thought into the dark. _Ever mine._


	2. Oflag IV-C, Colditz, Saxony, August 1944

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: this chapter contains some unenlightened discussion of mental illness.

He’d lost the will to fight weeks ago. Carruthers was shot in the shoulder as he made a break for the tree line. They dragged him back to the castle, and the Kraut surgeon dug the bullet out, but he died of septicaemia a week later, in agony.

Farrier barely got as far as the bridge. They threw him in the cooler for a month anyway.

A sliver of sky beyond the high window. Sometimes studded with clouds. That could waste a morning, picking out misshapen faces and flowers. Sometimes he saw birds swoop by. Strange to think that there were parts of the world that existed outside the war. Maybe those birds had been to places that had never seen a tank. He should have listened more attentively in Christopher’s birdwatching lectures. Their flights and calls meant nothing to him, except that they were free, and he was not.

One of the Dutch prisoners – before Jerry moved them all out – had told him the castle had once been a mental institution. His cell might have belonged to another, long ago. Another might have seen angels in the white-washed walls. Clawed his fingernails to shreds against the doorframe. Screamed himself hoarse into an unfeeling, unlistening void.

Another madman, just like him.

It was his third spell in solitary, and the longest. And before, there’d been others in the block with him, along the corridor, tapping out messages on the pipes, a percussion of solidarity and sanity. This time, he was alone, and the cold stone swallowed every sound except his own breathing.

Before, he’d spent time composing letters in his head. To his mother. _Jenkins’ wife has sent him what she assures him is a very decent recipe for custard when one is short of eggs and milk. I was under the impression that those two ingredients are rather essential to custard, but what do I know?_

To Collins. _I expect to hear you’ve been made Group Captain before the spring is out. You will forgive me if I don’t salute you when next we meet._ And others – effusive nonsense he’d never meant for sending. _I have had time enough to decide what you mean to me._ Stupid, indulgent rubbish about the colour of his eyes. It had passed the time, at least.

It had been his favourite pastime - composing unsent letters to Collins, over and over, until they were almost conversations, until the man himself might have been sat in the corner of the cell, polishing his boots, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, occasionally glancing inscrutably at Farrier through his golden hair. That much, Farrier had once been able to recall.

Now, though, there was no conjuring him. The letters he composed were blood-drenched and despairing, and not worth remembering. Soon, he stopped thinking about writing altogether.

Instead, he tortured himself with the million futures that would not come to pass. He might have moved up the ranks, by now. Chained to a desk, even, in charge of sending other men into the sky, and in charge of writing to their mothers when they failed to return. It was hard to think of going back now, though the quiver of the yoke under his palm was the only memory he trusted. No matter how much he craved it, he never dreamed of flying. Dreams had never worked like that. The faces he longed to see remained steadfastly absent, or turned away, always a little out of reach.

The old tricks were failing him. Factorising quadratics, or reciting the names of the college first fifteen, or the periodic table. Humming George Formby to himself. Anything to make the time pass, but his mind wouldn’t _fix._ He felt increasingly disorientated, the white walls closing in. To while away his previous spells in solitary, he used to cycle through the poetry they’d had drummed into them at school, but this time the lines jumbled and blurred.

_he took his vorpal sword in hand_

_“I am half sick of shadows,” said the Lady of Shalott_

_I shot the albatross_

_tyger tyger, burning bright_

_my love is like a red, red rose_

Around and around, a cat chasing its tail, _my love is like a red, red rose, that’s newly sprung in June._ The next couplet wouldn’t come. Collins had reeled it off well enough, standing unsteadily on a chair in the mess after he’d gotten his wings. “It’s the only poem I know,” he’d said defiantly, and gone bright red when they all cheered and whistled and stamped their feet, and scowled self-consciously as he clambered back down to earth. _My love is like a red, red rose._ Something about the sands of life, Farrier thought, but the words refused to come.

Days upon days, and Farrier’s body picked itself up from the cot each morning. It was becoming robotic – he ate the grey food pushed through the door three times a day, paced the cell, and every minute he was disappearing, piece by piece. He tried to speak, and no sound came out. With the lip of his enamel mug, he gouged his initials into the wall below the window. Proof for the next poor sod – and for himself, that he was still here, if voiceless, if senseless.

His disintegration was almost complete, when abruptly the month was through. When he walked, blinking, back into the light, Paris had been liberated, and there was a letter from Alasdair waiting for him.


End file.
